Hi Doug, thank you for generalising the title. As heard from many other developers I really appreciate the decision to allow VS 11 native c++ (MFC, ATL ...) apps to run on Windows XP... :-) For me as a MFC developer it would be extremely interesting to get back the old eVC MFC ARM support to write new WinRT desktop MFC apps, maybe with a special ARM ressource saving codesigning certificate for those apps, just as a suggestion. Greetings...

You've got my vote. There needs to be more backwards compatibility supported.
Let's face it, the only decent versions of Windows are XP and 7 (thus far). So Microsoft needs to support the only two successes that they've had.
The same should apply for C# as well.

"Separately, we are evaluating options for C++ that would enable developers to directly target XP without requiring a side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 2010 and intend to deliver this update post-RTM."

"As Stephen Toub said, the team is continuing to work through the matter of XP targeting for C++ in Dev11, and we will be able to make a definitive statement about this in a few weeks. Please stay tuned, and I appreciate your patience!"

Hopefully they are not bull**itting and really are trying to get XP support into VC11 RTM. In any case, keep up the pressure! We can't stop yet.

Yet another vote that support for XP is absolutely required, my team is not going to be able to use VC11 if it is going to be incompatible with XP. Multi-targeting? Pfff... Why upgrade to VC11 if we wouldn't be able to use the new toolset... Improvements to the IDE are welcome, but we aren't going to upgrade just for them.

(As a side note, I am not sure how exactly Microsoft intends to use this site. How many voices are needed to make them (re)consider something? 10? 100? 1000? There's likely no definite number for this... So, why have the counters then? /shrug)

Based on the number of votes on the two other top C++ items (Speed up work on VC++, Better C++11 support), which have ~2500 votes each, it is pretty safe to assume that over 50% of C++ developers are have voted on this issue. Microsoft, fix your mistake.